A New Year's Practice....

I do not place too much faith in New Year's Resolutions, partly because I do not place a lot of faith in my ability to follow through with them. But, I still dutifully spend time at the end of one year and the beginning of a new year to look back and reflect. This year, I am so grateful to leave the last behind that I am not dwelling much on the looking back. Instead, most of my resolutions have to do with a commitment to become more fully myself, to enjoy more fully the things and people that I love, and to revel in being back home and back close to the land I love. Unlike previous years, I did not write a list of changes to make or a list of goals for ministry. Those things will come. Instead, I decided that I would find time to get on a fishing boat, that I would read with the kids, that I would get out hunting and target practicing with my lovely new traditional recurve bow. I resolved that I would indulge my own deepest loves and deepest spirituality this year.

One of my resolutions is more strictly religious, though. And that is to read the Bible through this year. As you all know, I grew up Baptist and one of the blessings that came with that was a deep love and knowledge of the Bible. Some of my earliest memories are of me falling in love with the Bible. I had it read through, and most of it many times, but the time I was 12. In my teens, I studied Hebrew and Greek so I could (attempt to) read it in its original. As much as I have wrestled with it and raged at it in the years since, I have never fallen out of love with it. I can still recite my favorite chapters and its language still permeates my own. But it has been a long time since I have read it through, just for myself and not for a seminary class or a sermon, and simply sat with it, verse by verse.

So, this year, I am reading it through again. And, as I do so, I will post my thoughts here. My thoughts on Abraham and Sarah and the Exodus, on the ancient law and on the prophets, on the stories of Jesus and the exhortations of Paul, on the visions of apocalypse. I will wrestle anew with the Bible--with its questions and its paradox, with its stories of love and of sin, with its joy and its terror.

It is truly said that the Bible is central to the faith of working class Americans--even those who are not religious. Somehow, the Bible haunts me, not only as an ancient text or a spiritual guide, but as read through the experiences and hopes and failures of my people, of my family, of myself. The Bible haunts me with my own collective history. As I read through the Bible this year, I want to remember and reflect on this haunting.